December
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: On a violent winter night, Eren and Levi are stranded together, taking shelter in an abandoned cabin. The cabin has a secret past and secret whims, and history is predisposed to repeat itself. [**SPOILERS CH. 101]


—1 —

 _floating gently rocking in fluctuating timelessness i remembered a thousand generations and i remembered knowing that i was going to die and that id been assigned a death sentence all along since the day id been born since the day my father had been born since the day my fathers father had been born since the fall of the wall since earths creation i would die and i remembered telling reiner this that i was going to die just as jean had said and reiner that fool smiled and didnt tell me that he too had been assigned a death sentence_

 _floating gently rocking i remembered sealing the letter with hot wax and i remembered putting it away for when i would die and i remembered dying and only sometimes could i remember dying and other times i couldnt remember that my name was kruger or no was it jaeger or no was it the son who killed the father or me or? and now he and i remembered shutting the trunk with the letter inside and now i and_ he _remembered that he and i—is will—was—dying die—dead—_

 _when will December come again?_

— 2 —

The titan's hand reached toward the frozen lake. An incision was opened in the ice like a black wound. When the hand broke through, the surface of the lake shattered and gave in and a geyser of ice shot up like glass. Waves swelled and undulated and when the hand withdrew, it streamed thunderous shafts of water. Inside the palm lay a body. Columns of fingers closed. The hand moved in a slow, laborious manner, the way a creature of grotesque immensity only can. Teeth bulged from a red gumline. Levi shot forth.

Momentum blew his hair back and he squinted against the wind. He'd shed his cloak a while ago—and tucked his extremities into a compact streamline, spinning through the air, a released arrow, embodied. He drew from the strength of his core, twisting in flight, jerking his blades out. They connected. The tendons running through his arms snapped taut as he pulled the blades through. The nape flung free.

Aerially, Levi swung around, raising speed through the centripetal arc, watching as Eren's body dropped from the titan's grip. He fell. Thudding to the ground, Eren sank into the snow, solidly, brokenly, a spray of scarlet bleeding into the whitewashed landscape. The titan went facedown. The land shook. The body hissed away, evaporating in a wave of steam. Levi alighted, running, his legs whistling in air, then swiftly crunching into snow. He thrust the blades away, still running.

The heat of Eren's wounds was melting the ice as they hemorrhaged and pooled, spinning out blood in a fluttering red ribbon. He was lying face up, eyes shut. As Levi ran closer, he appeared stiller, colder, soaked to the skin with lake water. His face held a bloodless lack of pigmentation. His wet clothes were stiffening on his limbs. The fluids in his body seemed to slow and clot. His gaping wounds seeped gelatinous blood now.

Levi went to his knees and put a hand over Eren's mouth, feeling for breath. Against his hand, the air remained motionless, heatless, so Levi bent his head, using his fingers to part Eren's jaws, and pinched his nose. A moment Levi wondered if Eren, in fact, required resuscitation. The nape of his neck was intact, he should survive, his biology bowed down to only one thing, wasn't that true? Levi thought this and attached their mouths, and their throats connected, consolidating into a long channel.

Levi pumped breath through his own airway, propelling it into Eren's lungs. Under a heavy wet cloak, Eren's chest rose and fell. Inhaling, Levi tore away the cloak and gear and clothing, and Levi put his fingers on Eren's jaws and nostrils, and breathed again and Eren's bare chest rose and fell. The blood had stopped running. Levi slapped Eren's cheek.

"Hey. You better not be dying." Again Eren's chest passively rose and fell, and Levi slapped him again. "Stop lying around. We've got to move." The ash of Eren's lips flaked and Levi breathed again and Eren vicariously breathed in turn. His wounds released a plume of steam; they began to hiss shut.

"It's as I thought," Levi said, sitting back. His vision swam with lightheadedness. "Resuscitation is unnecessary. Your body will endure any condition as long as your spinal fluid is preserved. Too bad you look like a corpse, Eren. You won't charm any women, looking like that."

The lake water saturating Eren's uniform had solidified through the stitching and congealed his clothes with ice. Levi removed Eren's boots and undid his belt and removed his pants and left his thermal underwear alone, although it was beginning to freeze too. Eren's skin was bloodlessly pale. The initial stages of rigor mortis had begun to set.

Bending a shoulder, Levi hoisted Eren up, folding him like a starched coat across his shoulder. He began to wade through the snow. He whistled. The horse did not come. He whistled and kept walking, the horse was nowhere in sight.

He walked, and everything was white and quiet. And it was the quiet with the white that created a stark uninterrupted stillness. It was a solitary stillness, as though the world were this and only this, and everything was nothing more than the quiet, and the white, and the walking. Across it Levi continued, carrying Eren.

To the right, a bristling smear of trees threw a dark cutout on the all-white topography. The sun shrank back into the horizon. The snow parted as Levi moved, opening a shallow channel where he trudged. Extended in front of him, a shadow had attached to Levi's boots and grew long and thin in proportion with the sun's passage, stretching into a caricatured specter of his own figure. The shadow glided over wet crystals which glittered with a failing prismatic orange. Levi didn't stop, trudging, with Eren half-naked and stiff, folded over his shoulder.

The sun converged. A bruise of darkness boiled over them. Levi's shadow shriveled away. Above him, stars winked into light. Soon they spun with vast constellations, and the moisture of Levi's breath released in a white vaporous gauze. Night advanced, and with it came winter. The cold compressed Levi, closing on his core like a fist. His lungs stuttered and abbreviated. He gasped.

Numbly, he swung Eren off his shoulder and put him on the snow. Hoarfrost wreathed Eren's hair and eyebrows and cheekbones. His eyelashes too were bristled with white. Levi breathed onto his hands and laid them on Eren's dead-cold face.

"Hey," Levi said. "You'll make me carry you all the way home? How selfish. Unfortunately, I can't withstand these temperatures and you're making me colder, and it's nightfall. You're not a corpse already, are you?"

The night had come, and Levi was convulsing with it. He ached with tight, ceaseless spasms which gripped the muscles in his abdomen and in his back. Ice percolated through his clothes. It went right through him. Clouds of Levi's breath came faster as a physiological hypothermic panic seized him. He slumped onto Eren.

"For a human, you're not very warm, you know."

Levi closed his eyes and saw them together in the snow, Eren rimed in ice and Levi slumped and panicking, and amid the panic, he began to strip to the skin, outlining himself with all of Eren, and they thawed, body to body, melting into a limbless, nameless composite of both men. This was a vision, however. Because Levi was frozen and they didn't warm, and they didn't touch, sitting there, paralyzed, not moving.

Levi hallucinated. Images fumbled inside his mind, and it was warm there, and their skin was pulsing with ropes of heat. Eren's skin began to boil. It disintegrated under Levi's hands and then his body. Levi slipped into it, belly first, then chest, wrapped in a heat as tender as a warm bath. Eren's skin was opening. It was taking him in. Levi became Eren, and Eren became Levi, blended, fused, as though the titan ability had considered Levi's body when putting Eren back together again. As Levi imagined this, his eyes shut and sleep flourished its heavy thermal blanket over him. A howling wind knifed Levi's lungs. The cold thickened into a shroud, swirling around them. It was all right. Levi was warm, knowing that the blanket wrapped around him was not really sleep at all. Under its weight, he dreamed. Eren was swollen with ice.

With a crumpling sound like wax paper, Eren's eyelids pinned wide open and his eyes stared glassily at the night sky. Expelling a hard gasp, he lurched and bolted up. Levi opened his eyes. Eren fumbled to his feet. Unsteadily, he staggered in the snow, panicked, disoriented, and perhaps still stiffened with a case of rigor mortis. The soles of his feet were scaled with frostbite. He grabbed his head by the sides, as though to secure it on his shoulders, and turned, stumbling forward.

Doubling at the waist, he vomited two lungfuls of lake water and gurgled up more until he emptied. Then he turned his head, gasping. His exhales came in warm clouds now. In the thick of the snow, Levi was on his knees, jerking, his face burned with cold. His eyes were absent with the inarticulate hallucinations and the delirium reeling inside his mind. His pupils were shrunk into two blind pinpricks, staring at Eren with a look of depthless unrecognition. His teeth rattled. Frost clung to downy hair like gunpowder. The wind blew swirling tufts of snow.

Blinking glassily at the captain, as though he were a dead man re-animating, Eren brought his hand to his mouth. Blood welled around his teeth. There was a quantum burst of flesh and bone, and Eren took Levi up in his titan hands. By that radiating heat of the titan, Levi's body began to soften, and the distressed muscles eased and ached with relief. With Levi warming, tucked inside his palms, Eren walked toward the dense, black shadow of the forest.

— 3 —

The fire dissolved Levi's feet as he sat in front of the hearth. He had stripped off his clothing, and Eren, who wasn't wearing anything either, returned from the kitchen with cans of food, two canteens of water, and two bottles of booze. It was all he could find, he said, and he broke open the can of food and sat near the fire, on the other side of the old braided rug. He drank the food raw, and Levi's stomach gurgled and heaved, and his tongue went bitter. He watched the fire, procuring a bottle of booze. It popped open and potently exhaled.

Across the floor, the braided rug swirled, tightening around an epicenter. At opposite rims of the rug sat Eren and Levi, and each man was indeed aware of this, that each man sat away from the other, and that each man was sitting away from the other _consciously_ ; and it was the awareness of averted proximity that ran tension through their silence, not the averted proximity itself, although they were not aware that the awareness was mutual, or of the mutual tension. Unaware, they sat and they warmed, and they did not move.

"It's pretty bold to have a cabin out in the middle of nowhere," said Eren. His nostrils had crusted with two chutes of dried blood. Long grooves dragged from his eyes, down his face, to his neck where the titan had fused and assimilated with his neural circuits.

"It's reckless, is what it is," said Levi. "Haven't you noticed it's uninhabited? I'd imagine it's empty for a reason. And you have blood in your nose." Eren pinched his nose, a wave of heat roaring over him. "Don't pick it." Eren stopped picking it and drank his can. Levi continued: "Although, I suppose it's thanks to this cabin we're still alive."

"Sorry. It's my fault your body almost succumbed to hypothermia. If I had been more useful—"

"If you had done anything differently, who knows how things would have turned out." Levi raised his palms. The flames threw embers and crackling warmth. "We're a little frozen, but there are worse things. More importantly, how are you feeling?"

"I'm fine. Drowning wasn't a good feeling, and waking up was nearly as bad. But I'm glad I could use my titan before you froze to death. Also, where are my clothes?"

Levi thumbed behind his shoulder at the door, back at the lake, and Eren drew a crocheted blanket over himself and drank the rest of his can. His thermal underwear hung, clipped on a string, near the fire. It was beginning to steam dry.

"Our horses are no-shows, and the others would've located a hideout to wait out the storm," Levi said. "I'm running on fumes, and your gear dissolved inside your titan. All in all, we're in a shitty situation. And that's still assuming we're not snowed in by tomorrow morning."

Inside the pool of his blanket, Eren sat with his knees up and watched the fire. "My titan can get us back."

"It'll have to. Get some rest. You'll need to regain your energy by dawn. Furthermore," Levi said, and aimed the bottle at his lips, "clean your nose properly, will you?"

Eren used a damp rag to clean his nose properly.

— 4 —

A prostrated coma stilled Eren to the marrow. Only the small lift of his chest diagnosed a deep sleep rather than the mortal kind. In front of the fireplace, he was crunched up on his side, tucked in a tight fetal posture, wrapped inside the blanket's womb. Dressed now, Levi was sitting in an armchair. It was a spacious armchair of tufted red velvet. He was drinking, uncommittedly; the bottle was less than half empty, hanging by the neck in his fingertips. He held his chin in the other hand, leaning an elbow on the armrest. Without any thought to occupy his mind, he watched the fire.

December's furious weather shook the cabin walls, and the windows gave out on an impenetrable winter blackness. The blackness and the winter insulated Eren and Levi, pressing them intimately deep into each other's company, and although Eren was fast asleep, his presence had inflated. Levi could feel it, almost palpably, in the room. Kinetic, in essence. Like the wafting plumes of a warm, pulsing smoke. If he listened, Levi could hear Eren's quiet breathing.

Levi blinked. He returned and rose. The velvet armchair sustained a mold of his weight and shape, as though a phantom of himself remained seated while the rest of him left. Levi passed Eren, who slept on the floor, and walked into the hallway. It went straight back into the house and fell away from sight where the firelight didn't touch. A little matchbox rattled in his pocket.

Levi's hand felt along the wall, leading him. Lightlessness swallowed over him like a heaving mouth. He went on, blind, led forward by the sense of touch. A trimming bulged from the wall and lifted his palm. His hand continued.

As he felt along, the trimming vanished and his fingers plunged, falling through shadow. Pivoting, his feet brought him into a room. Levi took the little matchbox from his pocket. He snapped a match on his thumbnail, and a bedroom swam from out of the dark. It was a bedroom tidied with disuse and stagnation, far removed, arrested in midnight, it seemed, without progression. Everything was held in timeless immobility.

To the side, on a dresser, a wrought candelabra quivered and began to fade with the failing of the match. Before blackness could fall, Levi put the match to the wick. It caught. The feeble candle wavered, then filled to a steady illumination. The walls breathed and moved.

As the light expanded, he saw a neatly preserved bed with square, pleated sheets; spines on a bookshelf protruding from a bookcase, glinting faintly. Within the slots where books had been taken or misplaced, darkness clung to the frame and palpitated like muddy organs. Levi turned. On a desk, a quill pen slanted from an ink well and tilted off center, thinning into a black plume that fluctuated liquidly in the candlelight. Lording over the room was an old, splintering wardrobe with fissures that ran through the wood. Levi went to it. The doors opened without resistance. Inside hung limp button shirts and thin linen pants, neatly preserved from season to season. Levi took out a shirt and pants and laid them out on the bed. He shut the wardrobe.

With a turn of his head, away from the candle and wardrobe, Levi saw a trunk in the darkest corner of the room. A small, forlorn trunk made of wood. His feet contacted the floorboards, quietly pattering, taking him to it. Levi lowered to his knees and opened it. The top strained on its hinges, swinging back like a broken jaw joint. Sitting on his knees, he watched his hands move and slide inside the trunk. They disappeared into the dark.

He felt a minute temperature change, it was the slight coolness of disuse and solitude. Paper hissed against his fingers. When his hands returned, they held a parchment letter stamped with wax. The stamp was poised, half-opened. It had already been picked apart. His thumb ran along the edge, pressing the folds flat. The parchment whispered. Without rising from his crouch, he pivoted and faced the candlelight and began to read.

 _My heart,_

 _Against and in spite of everything, I am out of my mind in love with you. I feel myself trapped, without fear of the arrested heart, outside the machinations of human nature and the conspiracies of the seasons, trapped within your own fear, my darling, and your greatest anguish. It is madness, being in your absence. It is absolution, being in your possession. Forever, I worship your mind, body, and soul._

 _—W._

"Captain."

Levi didn't move, holding the stamped parchment, slanted into the folds of light. He was arrested where he was, unbreathing, as though he'd been transmuted into an unanimated figure wrought of tin. Eren was in the door, featureless, a mere outline. "Sorry, sir," Eren said. "I didn't mean to scare you."

Levi's shoulders lifted, and after a small moment he spoke and reanimated. "You didn't."

"You seem tense, then. What's that you're holding?"

Levi stood. Eren stepped forward, out of the door where he was obscured, and developed two eyes and a mouth, expanding with expression and form. When Eren approached, the floating globes of candle flame reflected on his eyes and the dimensions of his face shifted. Eren stood with his hand out. Levi relinquished the stamped letter, opened flat, disclosing to the passive glance the lines of a neat suave script. Holding the letter, Eren stepped near the candle where more light could pass through the retina. He smoothed the page. The script bolded with accentuated contrast.

"It's a love letter," Eren said. His irises contracted, following along the inked calligraphy, and Levi watched his face as he read further. Eren's complexion began to darken.

"Are you getting embarrassed?" said Levi.

"It's a little steamy, is all. I feel like I've invaded a stranger's private thoughts." He shut the letter and passed it over, and Levi repossessed it and opened it and read it over again.

As he read, the words imparted their meaning but they did not impart their feeling, and Levi comprehended the words, yes, but the soft, porous entity of a deeper recognition sat inside a self-contained solidity that he couldn't broach or access, estranged from it. He thought, perhaps, it was the iron nature of the underground instilled in him. He thought, perhaps, it wasn't the underground at all.

Sitting on his knees again, Levi fumbled through the trunk, combing through the piles of stamped letters. The letters fumbled into his hands, and fumbled out of them, and he searched, feeling for another letter to open and read, but none carried the substance or quality he was searching for. He didn't know what substance or quality he was searching for, but he figured he'd know it when he found it. Behind him, Eren was moving.

While Levi fumbled through the letters, Eren opened a knotty dresser drawer. The dresser grinded and coughed up dust. Eren swatted spores out of the air. He looked inside.

"Hey, Captain." Without removing his hands from the trunk, Levi turned, and Eren pulled out a gauzy brassiere and white lace panties. He held the pieces against his chest. He grinned. "Do you want to know who I think could wear this?"

"No."

"Okay, I'll tell you."

He closed the lingerie in a fist, and Levi watched as Eren's leg kicked up, his arm winding back. Eren's arm released, and the lingerie flung forward. In the air, it slowed and floated Insubstantially and without a sound, the silk drifted to the bed and settled. "Jean and his pink tits."

"Careful," Levi said, and turned back to the trunk. "Sarcasm has a particular tone and you missed it."

"This whole drawer is stuffed with froufrou underwear. Whoever lived here must've had an imaginative love life."

"Imagination takes only one. There's a single bedroom, and there are no signs of permanency," Levi said. "This isn't a home, it's a retreat."

"Delirious, then," Eren said. "Delirium takes two, right?" He was moving again, his feet punching solidly, heftily on the slatted floor. The open drawer gaped like a mouth with undergarments of silk and lace retching out of it. It remained open. Eren went to Levi.

"Delirium, huh?" Levi said. "On the bed, put those on."

"What? No."

"You'll argue?"

"No . . ." Eren turned heavily, grindingly, and went to the bed. It was quiet, apart from the letters fumbling. The letters stopped moving. Levi turned past his shoulder. Eren held up the brassiere with only his fingertips, his two rows of teeth tautly showing. A wash of blood thickened in his face. Levi stared as Eren unclasped the small hooks.

"You know, Eren . . . I meant the pants." Levi's chin lifted at the foot of the bed where he'd laid out the clothes. Eren turned his face. He saw it then. "They're not much, but you're showing too much skin for this weather. By the way, aren't you a little too willing?" As Levi spoke, he was very patient, and Eren's face was dark.

"You did that on purpose." Levi knew the dark of Eren's face wasn't only shadow.

"No. And that's rather unfortunate," said Levi. "You're an idiot after all, aren't you?"

"It looks that way."

Eren put down the lingerie and picked up the pants. He shrugged them on over his waffle thermal underwear. He didn't touch the shirt and moved to Levi again and watched as Levi's hands fumbled in the trunk, vanished from the wrist down.

"Why don't you just grab one?" Eren reached in beside Levi's wrist, his hand vanishing soon after. His hand reappeared with a letter, and he picked it open, turning to the candle. Levi stood by his flank. Concurrently they read, Levi reading across Eren's forearm, Eren reading below the chest.

 _My darling heart,_

 _Another day in the heat of summer, we waited for the boat at the lake. You stood, where the sun heaved its magic tongues of light, bathed in gold. I was watching you, captivated by your beauty, when from out of this happiness, a sudden sickness of annihilation broke through me. This is how it happens sometimes, melancholy, joy, or anxiety afflict me, without any tumult or reason: nor any pathos: I am deteriorated: I fall, I flow, I melt. Such ideas—grazed, touched, kissed (the way you kissed my skin with your tender lips)—recur. There is nothing gloomy about these ideas. It is precisely what gentleness is. My dear boy, I beg of you, reconcile the violence in my heart. I believe the summer's heat has gotten to me._

 _—W._

"Quite the sentimentalist, this guy," said Levi.

"The recipient of the letters is a boy," said Eren, and pointed it out on the page, and Levi's eyes went to the end of Eren's finger, looking. Eren turned. His expression bent away from the light. "Let's go back to the fire."

"Why, what is it?"

"They were corresponding in secret. And this place too, it feels like a secret. We're trespassing on personal matters. And I don't feel comfortable treading into someone's basement, uninvited. It doesn't sit well with me."

"I'd wager their complaints will be minimal. They're probably too busy decomposing in their graves, anyhow."

Eren was silent, turned away from Levi, and Levi watched Eren's turned face. Then Eren moved to the bed and picked up the lingerie. He folded it neatly and put it back inside the drawer, and as he did, his hands were not ungentle. He shut the drawer and went out the door. The punch of his hefty footfalls diminished. Levi dug through the trunk, slowly now.

The room was quiet, empty. On the walls, shadows moved the way memories do behind an inward eye. Shapes. Figures. Lace and silk. Faintly, Levi's hands shuffled and he thought about Eren turned away from him and he thought about what Eren said about the delirium, and then he thought about two gravestones biting the earth like teeth.

A letter arrived in his hand and tucked into his palm, and there was an undefinably different quality about it. Levi drew it out, turning. On the outside, it appeared no different from the others. It was, however, not the same. When he opened it, his glance perceived instantly the change in hand. Scratchy now, abrupt, and inconsistent, as though written by more than one voice, or perhaps a mind influenced by an ongoing dialogue of ideas and feelings, an elastic mind that had not yet crystalized with adult habits. A youth, the boy. He was responding to W.—

 _Sweetest man,_

 _In all this madness, I invited your violence and you imparted nothing but grace and compassion, and it would be against my better judgment and inherent self-interest to let you go. The cruel hand that guides this world could not touch your kind inviolable spirit. It is the sickness and the gentleness which counteract the human propensity to die a slow death. You have saved me, resurrected me, delivered me from the Great fear. Wait for me—promise to embrace me passionately tonight. I am yours . . . everything, everything, yours._

Clutching the letter, Levi rose.

— 5 —

In the living room, Eren sat in the armchair of tufted red velvet. His hands were gripping the armrests, rimmed with weak fingernails gnawed to the quick. The fire blazed in miniature on his eyeballs, and those eyes were opaque like nailheads hammered into his skull. He sat straight-backed, his face sealed and intent and brooding. Levi passed through the dark of the hall and strode mid-thigh into the light. He was still clutching the letter.

"Eren," Levi said. "Will you read this?" The letter fluttered into Eren's lap. Eren stared at it, then he opened it with his fingers. His eyes began to move. "Out loud."

Eren looked at Levi, then he looked at the letter again. "' _Sweetest man_ ' . . ." he said, and he said it without the softness of the intention, and Levi listened. And as he listened, his chest moved gently, attentively in the breast of the light. He listened with a blind stillness, straining to hear it in Eren's voice which remained immobile and impersonal. When the letter was finished, Eren closed it and had effectively delivered poetry in detached tonelessness without once yielding that of which Levi was listening for. Eren's face was still sealed, his eyes still opaque, burning with that flat heatless flame. Levi sank somewhere below his ribcage, below the nature of the underground which may not be the underground at all. The uncommitted bottle of booze sat next to the chair. He took it up.

"Let's put it back now," Eren said.

Levi drank, and for a moment he thought he might keep drinking. But he stopped and he said, "Once more, will you read it to me?"

"Why would I?"

"Yes, I see. I'm not making any sense." Levi drank and didn't stop until it was done. He tossed the glass into the fireplace. "Give it here, then. I'll put it back."

He took the letter from Eren's hand, turning. Eren caught him by the elbow. Without turning his shoulders, Levi reverted his head and looked into Eren's face. "Sweetest man," Eren said, and he said it this time with the softness of the intention, and Levi felt the booze, warm and effervescent, in his stomach. "I don't remember the rest. But I have some imagination of my own." In the undertone of Eren's voice, something gentle and cryptic stirred.

"Is that so?" Levi said. The booze was growing in his gut. He felt it.

"Yeah."

The light shone on Eren's cheekbones. His mouth was softened, somehow furious, all the same. His eyes steadied with a close kind of attention while the cabin trembled under the weight of wind and winter. Levi saw his own elbow inside Eren's grasp, felt his own stomach hot with alcohol, his elbow was being pulled. He passively rode the trajectory of the pull, his shoulders aligning to the head, rotating. His body went patiently, without resistance, as Eren drew him forward. Eren sat on his spine and elongated his neck and backbone, unfolding the full of his half-height, still sitting. His mouth came open slightly, as though he were about to speak. His eyelashes (they were long, Levi saw then) spread over his eyelids in an upward, nostalgic gaze.

At a vantage above Eren sitting, Levi leaned a knee into the armchair and acquainted his fingers to the unruly thick of Eren's hair. It was not the booze inside Levi's stomach that felt hot. He knew what it was then. They let go of their breath together, and Levi's forehead contacted Eren's, and they breathed, and Levi was aware, suddenly, of the friction of a clock ticking as it approached the second at which the hands must decide to shift forward or remain forever in anticipation. Arrested like the bedroom. Insulated like the cabin. The clock hands did not move. They were kissing now.

This was an effect of history's circular disposition, Levi thought. History was not a timeline of neatly ordered chronology, but a regurgitation, a reiteration, a resurrection of human excerpts, whether it involved love or war or both. They were repeating the past at each bend of their lives. It was all coming full circle.

With both hands, Levi held Eren's face and opened his lips, and his lips opening pressed Eren's lips open too, they were affixed at the face, and Levi sank down and slipped in his tongue past Eren's teeth, fanning it out upon the soft, quivering floor of Eren's mouth. Eren opened his eyes. His lips relaxed with passiveness. Levi withdrew his face, then he withdrew his tongue, putting it back behind his lips, closing them. Then he looked at Eren's face cradled in his hands. Eren was breathing inside Levi's palms.

"If that's all the imagination you have," Levi said, in undertone, "we should get some rest before daybreak."

Eren said nothing, staring with opaque, nailhead eyes. Levi's palms slowly came away from his face.

— 6 —

Eren sat on the foot of the bed, a dark motionless figure trembling with candlelight. The thin linen pants gave up too much ankle and his bare feet were long with pale, callused pads. Eren studied his hands. They were in his lap, one palming the other. An upturned palm glittered faintly with secreted salt.

The trunk hollowly clunked shut.

"Captain Levi—"

"No." Levi turned. Eren was watching the candle, sitting on the foot of the bed. He sat with an erect spine and vague staring eyes.

"I haven't said anything yet," said Eren, "and it would only be fair that I make my feelings clear to you."

"How admirable," said Levi, with only a shade of derision. He saw the sweat on Eren's palms and the rigidity within his neck and posture. "But I'm going to speak first."

Eren blinked. He bent, partway, at the neck. "Yes sir. You have my ear. I'm listening."

The candle softened the bedroom's dimensions. But although the candle was burning, Levi felt the space, the distance between himself and Eren, between their bodies, between something less corporeal too, an unutterable separation, as though the candle had been whiffed out some time ago and left them both in the dark, divided by different pitches of darkness.

"From the beginning of this whole charade," Levi said, "I never intended to trust you."

"I can't blame you. I haven't always had a reliable command over my ability," Eren said. "And after the battle at Shinganshina . . . Once trust has been violated, it's nearly impossible to restore."

"You're misunderstanding. You can't violate someone's trust if you never had a hand on it from the start."

"I see. So that's how it is."

Levi struck a match. He lit a kerosene lamp and cranked the flame to a low whisper. He whisked the match out and put the lamp on the bedside table.

"I think I've known," Eren said. "It's me and only me whom you can't seem to trust. I noticed all along you kept me at arm's length, but I'm not sure of the reason. If it's not because of my insubordination in Shinganshina—"

"It's because you don't bond with anyone."

Eren watched the floor, his hands unmoving in his lap. He felt the cold and the damp of his palms, the cold and damp of his feet. "I don't understand what you mean. Armin and Mikasa—"

"Aren't those two always running after you? You go off and do things on your own and forget about those standing by your side. It was no different today by the lake. One day, you'll charge ahead and leave everything behind." Levi saw the lingerie glinting on the bed, practically moving, with the soft light of the candle and the light from the lamp which was of a muskier, smuttier quality. "No mark on you lasts, Eren. Even if I were to slice you apart, your dismembered body would only evaporate into thin air, and here I am trying to get a hold on a cloud. What can keep your feet anchored to the ground, if anything at all? When you were a trainee, the others called you by a name, isn't that right?"

"Yes."

"Tell me, what was it?" Levi looked at him, and Eren looked back from the bed, turned across his shoulder, his eyes dim, glasslike, reluctant, sad. "Go on," said Levi, "remind me."

Eren slanted his face away from the candle, and its flickers coiled away from his expression. "The suicidal maniac," he said. His lips moved infinitesimally.

"That's right," said Levi. "A boy with no attachments. How fitting."

Eren closed his eyes and opened them. He felt his cold, damp hands and cold, damp feet drying, in a breath that his anxious pores seemed to exhale. He heard the rubber of Levi's footfalls. He heard it four times. Then he saw Levi's boots standing between his bare feet.

"I don't want to die," Eren said, without lifting his head, nor without lifting his hair away.

"That's good, then."

"I don't want to die," Eren said, and he leaned forward until his forehead dropped against Levi's chest. The hair ruffled away from the back of his neck, and the knob of his nape stood out, nakedly. Levi's palm fitted to the back of Eren's head, and he thought, _Your body bows down to only one thing, and there it is, I'm looking right at it, and you'll simply sit there, turning your weak spot up at me like that?_

Levi dug his fingers into the thick of Eren's hair and dragged him by the scalp. In his grasp, hair pulled in the roots, and Levi saw, at last, the face Eren was making. Levi looked at it. He saw what Eren was feeling, he saw what Eren was thinking, he saw the smoke of Eren's false intentions. Levi's lip lifted over his teeth and his eyes glared coldly. "You little fucking _shit_ —"

"It's all right, Captain. It'll be all right." Eren winced and his tongue was like paper when he swept it dryly over his bottom lip. His biceps tensed and expanded, and he clasped Levi in the circle of his arms. Levi let go. Eren's face dropped to his sternum again. "It's okay if you don't trust me. After all, I'm only a borrowed clock that's lost its hands. So if it gets ugly and I'm in agony, don't resent me. Just let me scream and turn a deaf ear to it. That's all you need to do, Captain. That's all."

"It's as I thought." Levi spoke calmly and pulled Eren's face upward by the chin now. Eren's eyes were flattened. "You don't bond with anyone. You'll do what you want without considering the feelings of others, and you expect me to go along with it. Unfortunately, I don't have any intention of fulfilling your wish."

Eren closed his eyes. Levi's hand impressed on his face, rumpling the flesh with the iron indentations of fingers. Drool whistled between Eren's teeth, his mouth swelling into enflamed straining protrusion. Levi's eyes were calm and cold, and he likewise moved with calm and cold, complete detachment as he shoved Eren down to his knees and hands.

Crawling, Eren started to give out, his shoulder muscles shivering like the sweating meat of a horse. Eren's center of gravity pulled him down by the gut, but it wasn't the bodily weight that pulled; it was the invisible inward weight that Eren kept in his stomach, an idea he had been fed long long ago at the origin place of imaginary conception: legacy.

Levi shoved his toe in Eren's rib bones, shunting him onto his fours. Eren coughed and his eyes were flat. By main strength, he held himself up on his hands and knees, his shoulders shivering with that imagined weight of something abstract and useless. Legacy—

"Open your mouth."

Eren came off his hands and sat on his knees. He sat with open palms and spread them apart, his bare chest slightly lifted, and Levi thought back to the time Eren had nearly been crucified in chains, reduced to a sad fetishized ideal of martyrdom like some makeshift savior. Eren opened his mouth and impatiently waited.

"Look at me," Levi said, and Eren looked at him. "It doesn't make a difference where you go, your friends will follow, whether it's going outside these walls or across the ocean." Eren's tongue was thickening with saliva and his adam's apple glided in his throat. "No matter how ugly it gets or how you suffer, I won't turn the other way. Unlike you, I don't have imagination."

With a single hand, Levi began to unbutton his shirt. Impatiently, Eren waited.

"If there's anything you want to say to me," Levi said, and his shirt was open now, and he spoke in low reminiscent tones, "you're in perfect position for me to hear you out." Levi looked straight into Eren's eyes and put a foot onto Eren's chest and seemed to communicate something about the past into Eren, imparting it with his eyes and with his body language, and then Eren saw it too, remembering. His chest breathed beneath the rubber of Levi's boot.

Eren cupped a hand around the heel and hooked Levi's foot onto his naked shoulder. The ribbed sole impressed his skin. His nose touched the worn pelt of the knee-high military boot, his face turning. His mouth came open then, upon the knot of enclosed calf muscle. His eyes were melted in a compelling gaze, and Levi stared, motionless, as Eren's tongue fanned across the warm leather.

Levi remained very still. Yet Eren's ear perceived the infinitesimal creak of threads pulling with tension, a tightly packed heat diffusing against his cheek.

Closing his eyes, Eren mourned.

— 7 —

 _. . . I'm sorry, Eren, that it always has to be you._

— 8 —

Lace whispered and the candle rippled the silk with weightless slippery motion. Eren could hear, out in the living room, the fire burning, evocative and remote, and back in the bedroom, it was the whispering lace and the flattering candlelight, and the discrepancy between pink silk and striated muscle. The brassiere and panties strained and murmured, and the white naked flesh between the brassiere and the panties was disturbed by an intricacy of scars.

Eren laughed when Levi said his tits were better than Jean's. Levi hadn't solicited affirmation, yet Eren affirmed in low secret muttering, the vocal cords in his throat sliding deeply, languidly. Levi's lips softened, his eyes sank back. Eren filled his palms with the satin and the scars and said, I don't much care for frills, I'd prefer the maneuver gear, (Eren amended), _Just_ the maneuver gear, and Levi said, Ah, but Eren wasn't finished amending, he continued in low secret muttering, and at the end of it, Levi made a hissing sound like that of a leaking fume.

What about the black one? Eren said.

In a frictionless glide, the black one flourished and inflated with Levi's compact body, and Eren grinned, sucking back a laugh, his stomach heaving up hard soundless humor. Then Levi came astride him, slipping his arms around Eren's neck, his eyes dark and cunning, sinking bodily against Eren's thighs, and he became very serious about the black one and so the grin clapped off Eren's face, for the black one began to perform, liquidly, irresistibly, as it'd been rendered to do. It flowed and crested against Levi's hips in rolling waves of lace, stretching across his back and the muscle coiling along his spine, exquisite and delicate against the indomitable body it contained.

With his hands still wound around Eren's neck, Levi arched slowly backward and pulled in the wings of his shoulder blades, and the black one poured tiers of soft mesh around his abdominals, and Eren began to throb with a squeeze of blood, looking at the captain's taut naked belly rippling under him. Warm sweat matted Eren's scalp. He sank a hand around the arch in Levi's spine, his fingers spreading in a tender caressing movement upon the small of Levi's back. His fingers were trembling.

He bent his head and caught the lacy brassiere in his teeth. Two cups of sheer fabric sagged, untenanted, and Levi's pectoral plate tensed under his lips. The black one was soft. It nearly dissolved in Eren's palms, it nearly melted on Eren's palate. Eren almost liked the black one. Even more, he liked what Levi became wrapped inside its principle of lace and silk. Softened against Eren's quads. No longer a cold insular soldier, but now a hot delirious promise.

The knife, certainly, brought back the edge. Levi insinuated the blade against Eren's cheek and Eren didn't flinch, didn't blink, and perhaps that attended to something of Eren's basest sensibilities as the knife pushed his face back and his vital artery stood in sharp relief from his neck, surging hard in his throat, his wind pipe turned up defenselessly. Levi's eyes grew darker as Eren put his lips on the blade's flat side, his tongue flirting dangerously with the edge. His sweet breath steamed the metal.

It was the ebb and flow and the organic haze of skin and burning denial. Levi removed the knife and put it into Eren's hand and gripped Eren's fingers around the handle. The black lace panties murmured on Levi's skin and accommodated, with some strain, the building volume of priapic temptation. Eren became conscious of the agitation, the scent of masculine skin as blood warmed between the two of them, swelling, sexually charged. Eren's face was steaming. Against him, Levi was pounding hotly.

The brassiere snapped away and fluttered down in ripped shreds.

Eren liked the black one better in pieces.

— 9 —

They rolled and thrusted on the floor, wrestling their weight against each other. They were both entirely naked, the flat of their stomachs clapping where they collided, possessed by a violent unraveling sense of physical desire, of grief and shifting clock hands. Rolling, Levi emerged on top. The fireplace threw his face into gaunt shadow. His head stretched down, and Eren's knees spread akimbo, his bare toes flattening to the braided rug. Eren saw the round bloat of Levi's cheek, felt the swallowing slip in the back of his throat. Eren's calves tensed. He held Levi's hair. His fingernails hissed against his scalp. The desire and the pleasure circulated among his nerve endings, as though a thousand little pinpoints of electricity jolted him spasmodically at burning points of his body. Gasping, he writhed on the floor.

Tendons jerked in his inner thighs, and he stared at the ceiling, seeing nothing, his eyeballs glazing over with a thick profound thoughtlessness like a dark stain. His mouth strained silently open, and it stayed silently open in a suffocating screaming gasp. Veins started to swell in his neck and at his temples; blood began to suffuse his skin—he had stopped breathing—and he turned scarlet with the escalating pressure of a tightly held breath. He didn't let go. Levi went on, the slide of his throat flexing the deeper he pulled Eren in. Eren's vision went black and hot and blind, his hips lifting, stiffening with sexual tension. Then, when he couldn't hold on any longer, all the muscles in Eren's body gripped down, and he broke apart in a convulsing rage.

Eren came hard, and he came loudly, and his face went sick with how hard he had let go. A gasp howled into his lungs, inflating his ribcage through the skin, and his face washed out as the pressure in him alleviated and he saw above him rapturous stars of a warm, fainting darkness. Sweat melted around his hairline. He thought he had died a thousand little deaths. Between Eren's legs, Levi's head came up.

As Eren lay there with soft, closed eyes, in the profundity of post-coital silence, Levi watched the breathing lift Eren's chest and depress it again, and thought he could see a closed, isolated heart retrograding back into its regular resting beat.

— 10 —

It was the chains and the metal bit, Eren thought. Or maybe it was the time he had lost his face and became a fleshless skull deprived of eyes and lips, and perhaps he was still that faceless skull and could never repossess his identity. Or no it was that time Armin had died in front of his eyes, and Eren had felt the iron drop of his childhood echo away into rings and screams of emptying emptiness, his diaphragm laboring long after his lungs had stuttered and sagged in duplicate vacuums, and perhaps he hadn't stopped screaming.

Eren's body resisted sleep, his body knew it may not wake up again. A more likely risk now than it'd ever been before. And the risk would only be more likely again tomorrow. And the next day too would be the same until the likelihood finally caught up with him and it all came to pass. Already it was deep into December, and a lot of people died in December. History would go on without him. He'd miss what he didn't know, and that was the scariest part about dying. The missing what he hadn't yet known or had only begun to learn. But it could be, he thought, that he already knew it and couldn't remember it and it was the lost remembering that he was most afraid of.

They were in bed. Eren was on his back. Levi shouldered over and pushed an arm beneath Eren's neck, lifting his head, and held Eren between the legs, comfortingly, pinning him down with warm weight and tenderness. Eren held Levi's wrist, feeling the jumping pulse on his fingers, and closed his eyes. He let his thoughts go. Feeling the tide of sleep pull him under, he fumbled between tiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. Gently, he began to rock.

— 11 —

At dawn, Levi woke. The clock of instinct and habit woke him. It was the sunrise's prelude of the beginning, of the end. He rose and began to dress. Eren was sleeping in bed. He slept on his back, a hand holding his own chest muscle, his head turned sidewise, occupying too much space with outstretched legs, in the kind of dreamless obliterated slumber of youth. The marks Levi had sucked and chewed into his skin had vanished. Levi put on his boots slowly, looking at Eren, at his neck, his lusty shoulder and bicep. His hair was getting long. Levi grinded his foot into the corners of the boot. He went into the living room. Then he went into the kitchen. He found a bottle of booze and drank it. The fire was enfeebled but still going. He went back into the bedroom.

As he began to negotiate the door, beneath his foot, the ground heaved and rumbled. Outside rose the sound of pandemonium and of familiarity. Levi's head snapped skyward. Like a bow, Eren sprang awake, with wide, white eyes. The cabin shuddered. With a grinding shriek, the ceiling began peeling away. Humanoid fingers of impossible proportion opened the roof from the house, and the head of a titan spewed over the sky. The wall imploded and in came a crashing foot.

"Move—"

At the last moment, Eren raised his forearms and ducked inside his elbows. The side of the house fell against him. Wood exploded. The wall broke into pieces, all at once. Levi saw the wash of blood.

Levi leapt, putting one foot out. The other was borne into the air. The ground dropped away and he was propelling forward, thrusted by the jet of dying fumes and engineering. He squeezed the gas, upped his speed. He swung up and rose high. Higher than the titan. His mass fell into floating equilibrium. He hovered on his back in complete inertia. He saw himself puncturing the gray sky with his chest. Then, twisting, he plunged back down—fast. His last blades were dulled, exploited to the blunt. When they connected, his blades dragged through the titan's neck, resisting ropes of flesh. In his grip, Levi felt the fatal creak. The blades snapped.

Barely, the damage upheld. The titan crumbled. By the time the earth's crust shuddered with a seismic wave, Levi had found Eren buried in the lake of wreckage. The house was beginning to burn. On scraping the debris away, Levi found Eren's muscle and flesh pierced and broken, and he thought, inexplicably, of the wardrobe with the runs fracturing through it. Eren was still on the bed, indisposed, without clothing. Levi's palm went to the nape of Eren's neck, feeling the knots and kinks of spinal vertebrae. It was all there. Eren's face rolled, he groaned. Gently Levi held him.

At an odd, arrhythmic pace that picked up in force and speed, the earth pounded. Levi tore his gaze from Eren, and he put it on the titan that was advancing. Levi put Eren down, gentle still, despite it all. As Eren sank, Levi took to his feet. He was out of gas, out of blades. His hands went for the knife in his pocket, flicking it open. Eren sat up. His eyes were wide and welled with broken vessels. Blood sweated down his face.

"MOVE," he shouted. "GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY." Levi moved, and Eren fleshed the sky with a monstrous humanoid travesty, roaring with the generational fury of the past and of the future—

The fire ballooned out, as if it were a whirling gown of silk and hot lace. The flames fed upon the house, the trunk, and the flames fed upon themselves too, rising. Against the hot blazing tongues, Levi thought he could see the trunk explode open by the pressure of heat and of fate, the letters flying out and giving themselves up to the fire, in a suicidal reckoning, disappearing one by one. Then altogether the letters were consumed. Upward the fire spun, roaring into a peaceful winter gray.

Eren ran. The snow hills broke under his running, and he tracked in retrograde a wake of immense, steaming footfalls. Levi held on.

"Eren. Those two titans," Levi said, "you don't think they could've been . . . ?"

The cornea of Eren's eyeball shifted and Levi stared into the well of an oversized pupil encircled by a muscular iris ring that flexed with refractions of daylight. The cornea shifted again. The horizon expanded in front of them in white profusion. From out of it rose the somber wall.

— 12 —

On the desk, a quill pen tipped with dry ink pointed west like the needle of a compass. The ink well was closed. Hot wax had coagulated like a cauterized wound, sealing the letter with the Wings of Freedom crest. Eren put it inside the trunk. The parchment hissed against burnt, shredded black lace. The lid clicked shut, and Eren drew a dark hood over his head, where inside the hood, his mouth moved silently in an elegy of words he'd written and reviewed and reiterated until he'd memorized the cadence in which the words flowed. It was his own heartbeat throbbing in veins of ink. His mouth fumbled the final line, and it spun behind his shoulder, as he shut the door. The words remained behind in murmur and in memory.

 _Remember: Against and in spite of everything, we made love in December._

 _—E._

Then he spirited away to cross the ocean alone.

— 1 —

 _floating gently rocking in the fluctuating timelessness of a lost dream the ship carried me to the shores where i saw you again at the crossroads of a hopeless incestuous history forever echoing the mistakes of the past_


End file.
